Projects are often assigned by teachers for students to take home and complete on their own time; but what exactly is the purpose of these projects? Students have regular homework, sports, other classes, and their own personal lives to deal with, let alone having huge projects to work on whenever they have any sort of free time. Projects are unnecessary and usually irrelevant to the curriculum going on in that class. For example, when learning about a Greek tragedy in English, it seems odd to be doing a book report outside of school on a completely different topic. Projects seem as though they are just large point activities that have a lot of input on a student’s grade, but little to do with their actual learning capabilities. It is important to teach kids responsibility; however, overloading a student with endless tasks is redundant, especially since most of the time the student has work for other classes in the meantime. Too much stress can have negative impacts on students that can end up being counterproductive to the responsibility trying to be taught, like symptoms of stress. On the topic of school projects, sophomore, Regan McKeehan says: “I think that they are beneficial sometimes but overused by teachers who don’t have enough time in class to do all they want.” Projects that are simply to be taken home and completed with little relevance to the teacher’s curriculum are the main issue. Projects that are started in class that students just do not finish are, however, the students’ problems to take care of. There are some types of projects that are effective to students learning, like research projects for a topic in science, but these projects are often for much lower points and are not seen as often. Overall, projects are not a bad learning tool in general; however, relevance and balance are important to making sure the projects assigned are more beneficial to the student rather than harmful.
Carter Corps News 